What is the Personal Review template?
Reserve an hour of uninterrupted time from your calendar to conduct a personal end-of-year evaluation exercise. Decide whether you want to focus on your individual or professional achievements or both at the same time. Create the perfect space and conditions for your own self-reflection by turning off unnecessary apps, notifications, or browser tabs.
Start the evaluation by looking at the entire past year and note down any significant events that impacted you. Try to find one lesson learned from your experiences, but if you feel like adding more, don’t hesitate. Then, take the insights from the last year under the microscope and reflect on your decisions, risks, accomplishments, learnings, personal discoveries, and more. Summarize the personal review with three words best describing your past year and write down any additional thoughts or intentions for the future.
What are the benefits of the Personal Review template?
Thanks to the Personal Review template, you can:
- Determine whether you’ve achieved (or not) your personal and professional objectives in the past year.
- Identify your strengths and weaknesses to continue the work on yourself in the future.
- Experience a sense of appreciation for your own hard work and high performance.
- Spot the areas where you should improve your performance or gain new skills.
- Outline the direction in which you want to evolve personally or professionally.
How to use the Personal Review template in a few steps?
- Reserve for yourself about an hour of uninterrupted time (or more if needed) and open the ready-to-use template on a new whiteboard.
- Write down on sticky notes events that happened in your personal and/or professional life. Below each event, add new sticky notes or text blocks to summarize all learnings from the past year.
- Move to the next part of the personal evaluation exercise and think about the insights from your last year. Use sticky notes to list the wisest decision you made, the biggest lesson you learned, the greatest risk you took, and the most significant thing you accomplished.
- Go a little bit deeper into the learnings from the past year and, in the next section, mark what you’re proud of, who influenced you most, who you think you influenced, what you didn’t manage to accomplish, and what you discovered about yourself.
- Thank yourself for the past year by summarizing it in three words and noting down any other ideas or intentions for the future.
**The template has been inspired by YearCompass.
Use this template